Working for a Financial or Healthcare Organization and looking to get the most out of your intranet? Take inspiration from the most commonly used intranet features by organizations just like yours.

As the Product Manager here at Intranet Connections, I talk with customers about what works best for them on the intranet and what doesn’t. I’ve had the opportunity to see how our intranet software has been implemented in a variety of different organizations. While each organization has its own unique communication challenges, I’ve noticed that intranets in the same industries tend to implement the same features. From my experience, here are the most heavily utilized features for the finance and healthcare industries.

Financial Intranets: Efficiency & Control

Financial institutions, including banks, credit unions and financial services, tend to most heavily use intranet software for efficiency and control. They focus primarily on ensuring employees can follow established procedures quickly and that they follow the rules.

The most popular Financial Intranet features used include:

• Forms and Approval Workflows
• Document Approval and Publishing
• Security Groups and Access

However, of the above list, the most commonly used feature for financial institutions is Online Forms. While most customers use Online Forms for Human Resources (HR) and Information Technology (IT) requests, such as vacation requests and requests for system access, Financial Institutions take this to a whole other level, integrating forms and approval workflows into their daily tasks.

Samples of intranet forms used by Financial Organizations include:

• Loan Approvals
• BSA Reporting for Deposits
• Destruction Approval for Returned Mail
• Customer Re-imbursement Requests
• Incident Reporting for Risk Management

Intranet Connections’ Online Forms work well for our finance customers because it enables them to create an “approval chain”. When a user submits a form, it can have any number of approval stages and each approval stage can be an individual, group or committee. All approval (and declines) are tracked, and can be printed in the header of PDF documents as a permanent record. You can also include notification stages, where certain parties, such as compliance, are kept informed, but aren’t directly involved in the approval. Our customers who use Online Forms the most submit hundreds of forms each day.

Healthcare Intranets: Education

Hospitals, clinics, heath regions and nursing homes focus on providing a high level of patient care and proper employee education critical to improving patient outcomes. Staff need to be trained on best practices, which can either come from the industry or the organization’s internal experts. These are normally reviewed and encapsulated in policies, procedures and guidelines.

The most popular Healthcare Intranet features used by Healthcare Organizations include

• Policy and Procedure Management
• Forms and Approval Workflows
• E-Learning / Online Training

Of these, the top intranet software feature used by Healthcare Organizations is Document Management. Healthcare must manage an enormous number of policies and it is not uncommon for Healthcare Organizations to have thousands of documents hosted on the intranet.

Samples of intranet documents used by Healthcare include:

• Out of State Treatment Referrals
• Admission / Discharge of Patients
• Treatment Guidelines
• ER Policies and Procedures
• Patient Safety Event Reporting
• Cleaning Protocols

Because adherence to policies and procedures have a direct impact on patient outcomes, healthcare organizations must ensure that all policies and procedures are up to date, approved by experts and communicated to staff. This is accomplished through a number of different features. These are the most heavily used Document Management features by Healthcare Organizations:

• Document & Policy Review – this reminds staff that a particular policy is due for a review, ensuring policies are constantly updated.
• Content Approval – this enables content to be authorized and approved before being made available to staff, ensuring staff getting only correct, relevant information.
• File Versioning & Archiving – this allows intranet administrators to have historical copies of policies, but keep them hidden from staff if they become outdated, allowing only most current version to be public.
• Document Read/Agree – this confirms employees are aware of policy changes.

Intranet Software Made for Finance & Healthcare

While organizations in the same industry tend to use the same features, every organization is unique. With the flexibility of more than 100 features built in to  Intranet Connections’ Intranet Software, you can tailor your intranet to meet the individual needs of your organization.

Are you in the healthcare or finance industry and think I missed an important feature? Let us know by contacting us at connect@icthrive.com

Top 10 Things in an Intranet

Download our popular ebook The Top 10 Things to Look for in an Intranet to discover the 10 essential features to look for during your intranet search.

Download Now